


This Is Not a Simulation

by AstroGirl



Category: The Pretender
Genre: Gen, secret twin/doppelganger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 16:04:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Project Gemini.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Not a Simulation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Trope Bingo for the prompt "secret twin/doppelganger." Contains spoilers for the third season finale, "Donoterase."

There have been 289 unsuccessful attempts at Project Gemini. 289 monsters and mutants, non-viable embryos and unsuitable subjects. But the 290th... The 290th is perfect. He is that rarest of things at the Centre: a second chance.

**

The boy without a name grows up learning to do as he is told. He learns to take his punishments, to suppress his emotions, to use his mind as the precision tool it is. Day after day he sits in empty rooms with featureless walls and imagines in painstaking analytical detail the workings of a world he's never seen. Sometimes it's difficult. Often it's painful. And it's always, always lonely, although that's not a word he'd understand if he hadn't been carefully taught to imagine the alternative. But it's okay. He's helping people. And he very much likes that thought, likes to imagine that somewhere out there in the real world, there are lots of people whose lives are better because of him.

It never even occurs to him to wish that he could see it for himself.

**

There is a man they want him to find. It's hard, because Mr. Raines doesn't give him much information, not even a name. But it's surprisingly easy, too. Easy to read the pain in the man's body language, the loss in the lines of his face. Easy to imagine himself behind those eyes, looking out.

Mr. Raines tells him this man is evil, even though that's not how he looks, not how he feels. But if it's so easy for him to become this man, does that make him evil, too?

**

Suddenly everything's changing. There are people he's never seen before, places he's never been, new tests, new sims... and then he's in the outside world and it's _huge_ , and everything is happening at once. He's trained to deal with complex situations, trained to analyze and respond, but change isn't something that is supposed to happen outside the laboratory; it's meant to be safely simulated within the controlled confines of his mind. It's more than a little overwhelming and there's not enough context to thoroughly understand it. All he can do is to clamp down tighter on his emotions, open his perceptions, and take in data until the situation begins to make sense. Probably, he thinks, it's a new kind of sim. Probably it's a test, and if it's one Mr. Raines has put this much effort into, it's clearly not one he can afford to fail.

**

"If you could look into that mirror and see your future," says the man who took him, the man Raines has taught him to fear, "it would look exactly like me." And even as he protests, even as he tries to deny the words, he knows, all at once, in the way the information sometimes falls into place in a complicated sim, that it's all true. That even the tiny scraps of belief he's had about his past are wrong. That he was created to be what he is, that this is the person he was created from. And that he is connected to something outside himself.

_My future looks sad,_ part of him thinks as he meets the strangely familiar eyes. And then, for the first time, in a small, hopeful, wondering way, he thinks, _I have a future?_

** 

Then he is flying away, through a sky that is very wide and very blue, and his mouth tastes lingeringly of ice cream, and everything is real, and he is not alone.


End file.
